"Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep...." ~ Rick Gaber

Halloween Haunts in New Hampshire

"The Shining was a Disco-era bestseller from Maine's Master of Macabre, Stephen King, but it was the foreboding grandeur of the Overlook Hotel and Jack Nicholson's portrayal of dangerous dull-boy Jack Torrance that made The Shining a part of modern culture. While it was the Stanley Hotel in Colorado that reportedly inspired King, the author could have looked a lot closer to home for his supernatural stimulation ..."

You didn't mention that Mount Washington Hotel's most famous month came in 1944, when representatives of all the governments that mattered (excluding Germany and Japan) gathered and agreed to make the US Dollar the world's reserve currency, in place of the British Pound. A dark day, indeed, for His Late Majesty. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The switch was promoted by a promise that the dollar could be redeemed for gold @ 35 to the ounce, which solemn undertaking was stabbed in the back by Tricky Dick Nixon, and whose remains have been pouring away ever since like blood from a corpse... currently (as it were) to the extent of nearly 40 times that rate, taking the fair name of America with it.

Ominously, that famous "Bretton Woods" conference was noted on a bronze plaque at the entrance to the hotel driveway, until the end of the 1990s when it was removed. Somebody, somewhere, decided it didn't pay any longer to advertise the dirty deed.